Friday, October 29. 2010

pgAdmin has this feature called a pgScript. Its a very simple scripting language for running
tasks in a pgAdmin SQL window. The documentation is PgScript manual.

Why would you use it over say writing a plpgsql function?

One main reason we use it is to run quick ad-hoc batch jobs such as geocoding addresses and so forth. The
benefit it has over running a stored function is that you don't have to run it as a single transaction.

This is important for certain kinds of tasks where you just want to run something in a loop and have each loop commit
separately. To us the syntax with the @ resembles SQL Server Transact-SQL more than it does any PostgreSQL language. WhenI first
saw pgScript I thought Wow PgAdmin talks Transact-SQL; now -- what will they think of next :).

Monday, October 11. 2010

One of the neat changes already present in the PgAdmin III 1.13dev, is the change in plugin architecture. Version 1.13 dev allows for multiple plugin*.ini files. How does this work.
Well if you have a plugins.d folder in your PgAdmin III version folder, it will read all the inis in that folder and load them as plugins.

Recall in PgAdmin III Plug-in Registration: PostGIS Shapefile and DBF Loader,
we demonstrated how to load the PostGIS shapefile and dbf loader as a plugin in PgAdmin III, well this time we will demonstrate how to do it using PgAdmin version 1.13. Better yet, we'll show you the new and improved
PgAdmin III Shapefile and DBF Loader in the works for PostGIS 2.0.